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Next week is the seventh annual National Apprenticeship Week. Follow the hashtag #NAW2014 throughout the week to stay up to date.

Liam Maxwell answers questions about the red lines on IT procurement that were announced in January.

It’s the Academy Awards this weekend, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office team in LA are supporting UK contenders. You can also learn more about British film here.

The Back In Britain Tumblr is part of the Government’s programme to mark the First World War Centenary.

Over on the Inside Gov blog, Sarah Richards talks about style guidance.

And finally, this week the Northern Lights were visible in some parts of the UK. Have a look at the BBC viewers gallery for some incredible pictures.

Government services have been getting a growing number of complaints from people who feel misled by websites which charge for access to public services that are either free or much cheaper when accessed via the official GOV.UK website.

Examples include people trying to renew their passport or driving licence, book a driving test or apply for a European Health Insurance Card via the NHS.

Example of a legitimate advert above Google’s search results. If you feel misled by an advert, Google has a simple form to let you report your concerns.

Many people complain that they felt these third-party websites did not provide of any value over and above the service already available on the official service, accessed via GOV.UK. Some of those complaining felt misled into thinking such 3rd party websites were actually the official, government-run service.

The vast majority of people end up on such websites after clicking on an advert appearing above the normal search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo.

If you feel misled by such an advert, Google now has a simple form to let you report your concerns.

We have been working with Google, by far the largest search engine in the UK, to tackle this aspect of the problem. Over the past few days, Google has  stopped selling adverts to some of the websites which have been the cause of many complaints.

But Google remains very keen to hear from people who feel misled after clicking on such adverts appearing above their search results.  This will help them remove such adverts as quickly as possible.

If you feel misled by such an advert, Google now has a simple form to let you report your concerns.

Google now offers a simple form to let you complain about misleading adverts

We would encourage people to complain to Google if they feel aggrieved, since this may prove the swiftest and most effective way to fix this problem.

You can also report concerns about potentially misleading adverts appearing above Bing and Yahoo! search results.

On a related note, if you’re concerned about phishing emails, or other Internet scams, visit this page on GOV.UK.

Robin Riley, HMRC Head of Digital Engagement and project lead for HMRC’s corporate content on GOV.UK.

This week marks exactly one year since HMRC moved its corporate web presence to GOV.UK, and exactly two years since the beta of Departmental and Policy information (then known as ‘Inside Government’) went live.

A year ago I wrote a post for the GDS blog about our experience in moving to GOV.UK, and asked what the coming year might bring.  So, I thought now would be a good time to look back on the past 12 months and see how far we’ve come.

As always, we start with the data …

HMRC’s existing website already generated large volumes of traffic. Traffic does not necessarily equate to success, of course, but it is an indicator of the chances of success. Our worry was that moving our corporate content to a new platform would make it harder for users to find (a decrease in traffic).

If I’m honest, I was also worried that HMRC’s content would get lost among the ‘sexier’ content from Departments such as Number 10 or MOD.

Now that it’s been a whole year, we can draw broad like-for-like comparisons between the most important corporate pages on HMRC’s old site and the new pages on GOV.UK.  The sites are very different so it’s not always possible to make a direct page-to-page mapping, but we can get pretty close.

*Three-month average of pageviews, Nov 12 to Jan 13 inclusive

**Three-month average of pagevews, Nov 13 to Jan 14 inclusive

***Average of peak monthly pageviews from a sample of three routine news stories

****Lin Homer’s appointment was during this period

What does the data show?

Many more people are finding information about what HMRC does. The move to GOV.UK forced HMRC to set out, in plain English, its activities against the Government’s main priorities. For example, arguably HMRC’s biggest priority is reducing tax evasion and avoidance.  On GOV.UK, HMRC’s activity on this is set out in a ‘policy’ which ties this activity with announcements and wider Government policy.  The nearest equivalent to this on the old site was an “issue briefing” that explained HMRC’s approach.

The data shows a dramatic increase in traffic to this content following the move to GOV.UK

We have also seen significant increases in traffic to content about what HMRC does (its purpose, vision and methods) and to HMRC’s news articles and announcements. Public accountability starts with public understanding. So, the greater visibility of this content (rather than it being hidden away) should be good news for users, and for HMRC’s transparency and accountability in future.

People can still find the most important corporate documents

Traffic to HMRC’s Charter – the key document that sets out HMRC’s obligations to its customers – has stayed at the roughly the same level, showing that people are still able to find the Charter and that our redirects (from old pages to new) worked OK.

Traffic to the Charter did show a slight drop (11%) comparing the two three-month periods. However, the three-month sample after three months on GOV.UK (May 2013 to July 2013) shows 9,488 pageviews for the Charter, an increase over the old HMRC site.  So it’s possible this slight drop is within the normal fluctuation in traffic for this page, but we’ll keep an eye on it.

What else has been happening over the past 12 months?

Making content simpler, clearer and faster

We’ve been working to make HMRC corporate information simpler, clearer and faster.

Simpler: We’ve moved more of HMRC’s very detailed corporate content, such as HMRC’s National and Official Statistics, to the GOV.UK platform, and made it easier to navigate.

Clearer: We’ve added more, completely refreshed information about what HMRC does in the policy section, so people can better understand what HMRC does and why.  A good example is the page explaining HMRC’s campaigns.

Faster: Where possible, we’ve delegated publishing out to the actual owners of corporate content in HMRC, rather than publishing everything through a dedicated central team.  This makes HMRC publishing faster and more efficient.

Moving the rest of HMRC’s content to GOV.UK

Moving HMRC’s corporate content to GOV.UK was only the start of the story.

Over the past 12 months HMRC and GDS have been working together to move HMRC’s customer-facing content and detailed tax content. We’ve also been sharing the detail of what we’re doing as we do it.  You can find much more information about this work on the HMRC transition blog.

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You may not have noticed, but we recently changed the bit that says ‘GOV.UK‘ in the black banner that appears across the website. It now uses New Transport, the same typeface that we use across the rest of the website. Previously it used Gill Sans.

Early versions of GOV.UK used Gill Sans, so it made sense to have the banner using the same typeface. When we changed the website to use New Transport in 2012 we kept the banner in Gill to reassure users that it was the same website as before.

Then we got a bit busy working on more important things, before recently realising that we still hadn’t updated the masthead.

Myself and Alex made a first release of the banner in New Transport at the beginning of January this year. Henrick (who co-designed New Transport) then helped us to finesse when he dropped by the office a couple of weeks ago.

This image shows the evolution of the masthead from early 2012 to today:

Replacing the image file with text gives us a few practical advantages too:

• the text will scale better to different zoom levels, viewport sizes, pixel densities without any real effort on our part
• simpler CSS for print views
• better progressive enhancement for browsers without CSS support or images, which is a bit niche but good to do

Today is World Book Day, so we thought it would be fun to look back through history and find out about some civil servants who dabbled as authors on the side.

Ian Fleming (image courtesy of Libor Kriz on a creative commons licence)

Victorian author Anthony Trollope spent many years working for the Post Office, and was responsible for introducing pillar boxes after encountering them during travels in France and Belgium.

In his later years, poet William Wordsworth took a job in the civil service. Another government poet was John Milton, author of “Paradise Lost”. He was one of the very earliest civil servants, writing propaganda for Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

Science fiction novelist Geoff Ryman, now a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, used to work with the team that built GOV.UK’s predecessor, DirectGov. He led the teams that made the first versions of the British Monarchy and 10 Downing Street websites.

In 1996, Ryman published a novel as a website: 253 is the story of an Underground train and every passenger on board it, set in the moments leading up to a disaster.

Alan Blackshaw acted as Principal Private Secretary to three government ministers and took on all sorts of other government jobs during his years as a civil servant. His passion was mountaineering, and in the mid-60s he wrote a “bible” for climbers, “Mountaineering: From Hillwalking to Alpine Climbing” (now sadly, it seems, out of print).

The best known of all is probably Ian Fleming, who spent years working for British Naval Intelligence, and used his experiences as the basis for his series of James Bond novels.

You might not expect to see much about Bond on GOV.UK, and you’d be right. But there is this entertaining pun-packed speech by Sir James Bevan, the British High Commissioner to India:

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, friends and colleagues, welcome. I don’t have a Licence to Kill. But I do have a licence to open our house to friends for events such as this. And tonight, For Your Eyes Only, I also have a licence to mention the titles of every single James Bond movie in a speech.

That’s just the start. You should see what he does for Moonraker.

This week, Cath Richardson and Jon Rimmer talk about some of the user research methods we are using at GDS to help us understand how people use our online services.

Join in the conversation on Twitter @gdsteam, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

Transcript

Cath Richardson, User researcher: I’m Cath, I’m a user researcher at GDS. One of the things that we made for SPRINT GO was these user research activity cards. We wanted to give people something tangible to go away with that would inspire them to think about different ways they could do user research. Right now one that I’m using a lot is Remote research – so that is phoning people up, doing some screen sharing, and looking at something together and getting their feedback in a really quick way. Each card has a description of what it is and then a little bit more detail on the back as to how you might use it, where you might use it and the kind of things you should take into account when you’re doing this in your research. We’re also asking people to give us feedback on the cards, so on the very front one we have an email address: reasearchcards@googlegroups.com so people who are using the cards and are giving them a go, we’re really interested to get your feedback.

Digital Inclusion scale

Jon Rimmer, User researcher: My name is Jon Rimmer, I work on the Digital Inclusion team as a user researcher. We’ve developed a scale to work out the landscape of who’s online and who’s offline. We’ve got 21% of the population that lack basic online skills. So having mapped out where those people are on the scale, we are then able to work out what sort of initiatives we can do to encourage people to get online. It also allows you to plot where your transactions are, what are the skills that are required in order to independently complete that transaction, and what you can do is see if there’s any disconnect, so if the majority of your service users lie to the left of that transaction, as in they are not necessarily skilled enough to independently complete that transaction, then you need to either simplify that transaction online or provide support and upskilling to your service users.

In celebration of International Women’s Day we’re dedicating our weekend links to the work and achievements of women – in tech, in history and in innovation.

Join the conversation on Twitter @GDSTeam.

Land Girls image courtesy of The National Archives

Parliamentary debate from 6 March - the contribution of women to the economy of the UK, to mark International Women’s Day (PDF download).

The Department for International Development updated the Strategic Vision for Girls and Women.

Dundee Women in Science Festival –  1 to 24 March.

Join Google in collaboration with Women Techmakers today between 3pm and 6pm for the Women Techmakers Summit at Campus London.

GDS’s Head of Content Design, Sarah Richards, shares her thoughts on women in technology.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport have released a digital postcard highlighting the roles women played in WW1

Read about The National Archives’ Women’s History Month – a national campaign to raise the profile of women’s history and to champion women of the past.

Katy Arnold is a User Researcher at the Home Office. 

The Home Office Visas exemplar is one of 25 projects leading the digital transformation of government. Our role is to make sure that what we build meets the needs of the people who use it. It’s called user research and it’s central to everything we are doing.

Since the beginning of the project we’ve been keen to talk to would-be users about what we’re building. We started the Beta in October, and since then we’ve spoken to over 50 people, asking for feedback on what we’re doing. This feedback has helped make the application form better: shorter, simpler, smoother and much faster to complete.

We know that we are not finished yet; far from it. But, we know that what we’ve achieved has definitely surpassed what’s gone before. We’ve made the effort to ask our users what they need from our service, and that’s given us a much better chance of making it work for them.

Reaching out to our users

A couple of weeks ago we invited users of the current Priority Service to come to our offices for a demonstration of the form. At the moment, the service uses long paper forms that often require repeated entry of the same details (for example if you are bringing a spouse or child into the country). We wanted to demonstrate the digital version of the application due for release, and give our users an opportunity to ask questions about it.

We also wanted to get some feedback on the new online form, so we asked users to bring their own devices, and made some of our devices available too. Once the demo was over we invited users to get online and go through the application, while we were around to gather feedback.

On the day

We had a lovely mix of people in the room: User researchers, developers, product owners, scrum masters and testers were in attendance; all interacting and researching with our users. Rachel and Marianne from the Priority Service team in Sheffield came along too; answering questions and noting down ideas for improvements. It was great to see; user research really is a team sport.

What we learned

This exercise allowed us to get feedback from a lot of users very quickly, and we’re already working on the things we heard. We were thrilled to find how effective the day was at involving our developers and other team members in user research. We’ll definitely do it again.

What’s next

We’re looking forward to seeing people using this thing for real. We’ll still be looking for ways to continuously improve the service as we keep adding new features and functionality; and while we are proud of what we’ve achieved so far, we know that there’s a long way to go.

Happily, our users are very keen to be involved — and we want to keep it that way. We’ll continue to test future releases with real users every week and listen to customer feedback. As our first service goes live, we’re excited to be able to measure satisfaction on the performance platform, too.

We’re always glad to hear what you think. Tell us below, or tweet us:

@katyarnie

@finiteattention

@i_41

@clarewilcockson

Join the conversation on Twitter – @GDSTeam, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

GDS is building a reputation for creating a digital government based on user need. We’re transforming digital services, opening up government, and building skills and capability in government.

Together we have designed and delivered the award-winning digital platform of GOV.UK. We work with some of the most vibrant and digital savvy people in the UK.

We get a huge amount of interest from overseas governments and organisations wanting to learn about our work and share their knowledge.

I have recently done some research to see where our visitors to Aviation House have come from.

In 2013 GDS hosted over 100 international visits from all corners of the world; from heads of state to ministerial visits to developers and web operations teams. International visits are a great way to share our work and learn from others.

The main areas our visitors want to learn about include:

• service improvement and cost reduction through Government IT and open standards
• transforming digital services
• identity assurance
• digital strategy and policy
• transitioning websites to GOV.UK
• the unique culture at GDS

Visit requests are prioritised according to our current programmes of work. Our colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) help with these decisions.

We can’t accept every visit request – we need to focus resources on our current programmes of work. But we do respond to all requests and provide follow up information.

We continue to work with international partners in areas of common interest, and building our reputation for first class delivery based on user need.

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You may also be interested in:

Breaking barriers and opening doors

Co-operating with Korea to put users first

Technology Leaders Network

Sarah Richards is Head of Content Design at GDS. We sat down with her recently to ask some simple questions: What is content design? What difference does it make?

In light of the chat we had with our accessibility expert Josh Marshall a few weeks ago, how does good content design result in better communication between government and citizens?

In this short interview, Sarah summarises what content design is all about, what its job is, and how it’s used on GOV.UK.

You can listen to the full interview (just under four minutes) in the embedded Soundcloud widget below. There’s a full transcript below that. Alternatively, you can download a copy from the Internet Archive.

Follow Sarah on Twitter: @escmum

Follow Giles on Twitter: @gilest

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Transcript

Sarah Richards: My name is Sarah Richards, and I’m Head of Content Design here at GDS.

Interviewer: Fantastic. What is content design, and why do we do it?

Sarah: Content design … Traditionally you may have had an editorial team, but we want to distinguish the difference between just writing information and presenting the user with the best information possible. It’s not just writing any more. We take a user need – so something that a user will need to find out from government – and we present it in the best way possible. That could be a calculator, a tool; it could be a video, it could be anything. It doesn’t have to just be words. That’s why we call it content design.

Interviewer: When I spoke to Josh Marshall a few weeks ago, he said improving the quality of all the written content on GOV.UK has made more of a difference than anything else:

It’s changed the perception of how government talks to its citizens.

How did we do that? How did we change that perception?

Sarah: Basically, it’s just writing clearly. We found that if we use a lot of adjectives and describing words, people will think it’s spin, and they’ll think it’s jargon. Or if we use jargon we lose trust, so people don’t come to us, they go somewhere else. We are the authoritative, trusted source, or we should be, so we find that if we just write very plainly, very clearly, very directly, everybody understands; we make the English very easy to understand.

A lot of people get fixated on accessibility being just about screen-readers and putting transcripts on videos; that’s not it. Accessibility is about opening up all government information to anybody who is interested enough to look. That means that we need to write very plainly, very clearly and very directly.

We need to take into account that people are on a range of devices. They generally don’t have enough time to look at what they’re doing. Interacting with government isn’t a pleasant thing. It’s not a case of ordering a book and getting a nice shiny gift for your coffee table; it’s about either getting money or giving money, or your rights, or something. We need to take all of that into account when people read.

Our research shows us that people only read about 20-28% of a page, so we have very little to play with, actually. We need to get that information across quickly. That’s what we mean by accessible; it’s not just about disabilities, it’s about opening government information to anybody who wants to be able to read it.

Interviewer: Writing this clearly is not something that comes naturally to government, so what was the hardest thing about making that happen; making that be the default?

Sarah: Culture change. Actually, we can write style guides, and we can write technical guidance on how to do these things. We can show research; we can show lab testing, and users failing or doing very well with copy. We can do all of that, but the thing that is the hardest is to get into people’s minds that there is another way of doing it, or there is a better way of doing it.

Or even harder, actually, is to try another way, which may not work, and throw it away and be completely okay with that. That is actually probably the hardest thing.

It’s also about taking something, and you may not have stats and metrics on it, because it’s new, and so trying something and just being completely prepared to throw it away.

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Read about the formidable politician Clement Attlee over on the History of government blog.

Lego-obsessed? Take a look at this incredible fully functional Lego keyboard.

One man and his dog – the benefits of integrated care on the Social Care blog.

The Foreign Office has joined Buzzfeed – read their first post here.

Read about new listings pages  over on the Inside GOV.UK blog.

And finally, in dream job news, NASA are looking for  ‘Citizen Science’ asteroid hunters.

Last autumn we shared early results of testing various versions of the GOV.UK ‘Thank You’ page. First introduced a year ago, people see this page once they’ve bought their tax disc via GOV.UK. People are generally more open to trying out new stuff after completing a successful transaction, so we’ve been using this page to encourage as many  as possible join the NHS organ donation register.

 Over 350,000 people have now registered for organ donation via this one link on GOV.UK [since Jan 2013]

Via a comment on that earlier blog post, Claire reminded me recently that we’d not shared the final results of the experiment, notably which type of message was most effective at persuading people to register.

What we tested

Working with the Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights team, DVLA and NHS Organ Register team, we tested eight different calls to action with a total of over 1,000,000 visitors to the tax disc ‘Thank You’ page.

The eight variants below appeared at random, and we worked closely with the NHS Organ Donation team to see which one generated the most completed registrations. This is known as A/B testing.

What we found

Here are the results, showing which variant was most effective at getting people to actually register for organ donation. The percentages are not just for click-throughs; they’re actual organ donor registrations.

The most successful variant introduced concepts of reciprocity and fairness by asking people: “If you needed an organ transplant, would you have one? If so please help others.”

I don’t feel qualified to speculate as to the reasons why this particular message performs best – data trumps intuition. But, feel free to add your thoughts via the comments below.

We ended the experiment in the autumn, and have left this “reciprocity”  message in place. Meanwhile, the new digital team at DVLA has got on with updating the tax disc service.

Since the DVLA tax disc online service is used by around 2m people every month, the impact of such optimisation is significant.

Extrapolated over 12 months, some 96,000 more people will register compared with the original call to action. (“Please join the NHS Organ Donor Register“). In December the former Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights team published a paper with more statistical detail on the experiment.

In total over 350,000 people have registered for organ donation via this one link on GOV.UK since we added the original call to action just over a year ago.

Stuff worth doing.

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Following yesterday’s budget announcement, we thought it would be interesting to look at how GOV.UK performed on the day compared with budget day last year.

Visits were up by nearly 40%:

2013: 1,535,222                       2014: 2,127,341

Part of this increase could be because the web as a whole is growing, and GOV.UK is bigger. But, we think we can attribute some of the rise to an increase in social presence, our work with different departments, and improvements to the way the budget information is presented.

The budget is a big, complicated piece of work, and involves many people across government. Putting together sensitive data in a way that makes it accessible and understandable is much more difficult than it looks. Here at GDS we really appreciate all the hard work that goes into making the budget happen.

We had on average 1,477 visits per minute yesterday, compared with 1,066 visits per minute on budget day last year.

I’ll leave it up to you to work out when the Chancellor started and finished speaking …

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GOV.UK is the best place to find government services and information online. The best way to get there is to type www.gov.uk into your browser.

If you found the service you’re looking for through GOV.UK, it’s reliable and priced correctly.

GOV.UK is a work in progress. Some of the pages you click through to might look a little different to the first GOV.UK page you land on. We’re working on giving them a consistent look.

Remember: even if they have slightly different colour schemes and layouts, behind the scenes the pages you reach through GOV.UK are all legitimate.

This is not necessarily the case for sites you reach through online ads or a general search through a search engine like Google or Bing. You may end up paying more for the service than you need to, or end up paying for something that doesn’t arrive. You might also be giving your personal details to an untrustworthy source.

There is no need to do this.

The government doesn’t outsource its online services. If, for example, you’re renewing your passport or getting your European Health Insurance Card and you are concerned about the site, go to GOV.UK and type the service you need in the search box. The search results will contain the service you need, and it will be available for free or at the correct price. Even if the layout is slightly different to the landing page.

If you found it through GOV.UK, it’s OK.

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Image of Alan Turing courtesy of Michael Dales under a Creative Commons licence

The government is creating a world-class research institute specialising in data science dedicated to British WW2 code-breaker Alan Turing.

Want to find out more about the budget? You can download all the documents on GOV.UK.

This week the Ministry of Justice finalised work on changes to the court finder ahead of the introduction of the single family court on 22 April.

Read the review of Parliament’s digital service provision.

Inside GOV wrote an update to Specialist pages.

GDS technology talk about innovative JavaScript workflow that allows performance data to be visible to everyone, while those on high-end browsers could have more powerful interactions.

Twitter is releasing a new feature that makes it easier to view videos.

I’ve spent time this month at events that made me feel excited about how people are using technology and data to change things.

Breakfast at DrupalCamp

On Saturday 1 March I was asked to give the opening keynote at DrupalCamp London 2014. This is one of the major events for the Drupal community and I was delighted to have been approached. I was the first speaker on the Saturday morning and was on before breakfast. So my slides have a particular theme.

We have three clear, overarching principles in GDS – Trust. Users. Delivery. We work on the basis that the team is the unit of delivery; teams are fluid, dynamic, appropriate and responsible.

The point of principles is to provide a challenge around approach and behaviours. They provide points of reflection for all the things we do – from building GOV.UK to working with departments on transforming public services.

For transformation to work we need to break out of the old model of vertical silos and a market dominated by massive, proprietary systems and services.

We have a number of sites which have been built by SME partners in Drupal. Whilst these are mainly websites targeted at specific audiences, the Office of the Public Guardian – responsible for the Lasting Power of Attorney exemplar – are building an entire new back end to run their business which uses Drupal at the core.

I found Drupalcamp London 2014 a fascinating experience; it was great to catch up with members of a community whose work is helping us all produce better systems and provide better services.

(sorry about the bacon)

Nothing like a hack on a Sunday …

On Sunday 9 March, I was one of the judges at Rewired State’s National Hack the Government day (NHTG) 2014.

I have been involved in NHTG since the start and each year I am amazed by the talent and the ideas on show.

We ended up giving out four prizes as we could not get the shortlist down to three.

The four we chose were:

Alertin’time

This has the best possible user interface; that is, it does not have one. Alertin’time does one thing and does it in a way that means it is invisible until needed. We agreed this is a nice way of thinking about how to build user interaction for mobile devices which are normally characterised by ‘noise’.

Corkr

These guys asked and tested a basic question: “who makes sure that public sector websites remain secure and up to date?” The answer turns out to be complex and it’s a challenge we need to address.

Dataforce

Dataforce also asked a deceptively simple question: “is the open data which the public sector makes available actually useable?”.

Shadow Mapping LIDAR

This was my personal favourite. Taking data which had been collected on land and building height and using this to work out the shade vs sunlight in urban areas was a brilliant idea. The obvious use is for solar power, but I would be interested to see this used with public health, crime and deprivation data; there may be some interesting stories buried there.

Another year, another range of fascinating and challenging hacks. I’d like to say a big thank you to my fellow judges – Eddie, Stef and Max.

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Thanks to Amazee Labs for the images, more of which are available on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.

We talk a lot about building “digital services so good, people prefer to use them”; but we don’t often talk about the people who are going to run those services.

These people are very important. They’re in charge of building, then maintaining, services that meet user needs and the criteria set out in the service standard. Government is going to be hiring a lot of service managers in the coming years, as the work of digital transformation continues.

So what’s it like being a service manager? What sort of things does a service manager think about all day? What’s inside a service manager’s head?

A service manager answers

Kit Collingwood-Richardson should know. She’s the service manager for Lasting Power of Attorney, one of the 25 most-used services that are being digitised first as part of our transformation programme. We visited Kit at the Ministry of Justice to ask her all these questions and a few more.

In this short interview (about 11 minutes), Kit explains “what irks and what works,” what her team has learned from running a public beta, and what they’re expecting to happen once the beta phase is complete and the service goes live.

You can listen to the full interview in the embedded Soundcloud widget below. There’s a full transcript further down. Alternatively, you can download a copy from the Internet Archive.

Follow Kit on Twitter: @kitterati

Follow Giles on Twitter: @gilest

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Transcript

Kit: My name’s Kit Collingwood-Richardson and I’m the Service Manager within the Office of the Public Guardian for the Lasting Power of Attorney exemplar service.

Interviewer: Lovely. Can you briefly explain, as if to somebody who’s never heard of it, what the service does?

Kit: The service allows a user to apply for a Lasting Power of Attorney application online. It takes them through the application step-by-step, validates their answers, allows them to pay online and then to print it off for registration.

Interviewer: Again, for somebody who doesn’t know what a Lasting Power of Attorney is, what’s that?

Kit: A Lasting Power of Attorney is a deed that you put in place and it’s something which protects you if you were to lack mental capacity in the future. You appoint people through a Lasting Power of Attorney, so that those appointed people can manage your affairs if you were to ever lack mental capacity in the future.

Interviewer: Can you briefly describe how the digital service that you’ve got running now improves on the service that it replaces?

Kit: Sure. At the moment we take in about 300,000 LPA applications per year. Up until now it’s been an entirely paper-based service, and the pack of forms and guidance that you need to get you through that service is about an inch thick; it’s about the thickness of a 10p coin.

It makes it really, really hard for people, actually, to wade through all of those words and to be able to make a decision about the people they want to manage their affairs, a really, really important set of decisions. What our tool does is obviously does away with the paper at the point that you’re filling in the form, and it takes you through simple questions step-by-step to really clarify what you’re trying to do.

It means that you can stay clearheaded and make those decisions quickly, simply, without having too much paperwork in your way.

Interviewer: What’s the status of the service at the moment?

Kit: It’s in public beta at the moment and has been since last year, and we’re just getting ready to go live actually, just preparing now.

Interviewer: When is that likely to happen?

Kit: We’ve committed to doing it for June; we might do it a little bit ahead of time. We’re just at the point of finalising the functionality that we need, we’re testing the service to make sure it’s robust enough to go live, and we’re arranging our service standard assessments, which is a really important part of going live with any exemplar service.

Interviewer: With regard to the set of 25 exemplars that is part of the GDS transformation programme, you’re at a fairly advanced stage; you’re blazing a trail as far as reaching the end of your public beta goes.

Kit: Indeed, yes.

Interviewer: The question that might arise in some people’s heads is: what did you get out of doing your public beta? What have you learned from it?

Kit: It’s almost: what haven’t we learned? At the point we went to public beta, we actually didn’t do a private beta, which some services have done; we went straight from alpha to public beta. The journey that we’ve been on since then has taken us from really the basic form-filling service, with some validation, to a point where I feel confident that we can go live and offer the best possible user experience we can.

That’s enabled us to obviously track our users, track their journeys, find out what really works for them. We’ve obviously really matured the functionality through being a live service, and I can’t really overstate how important that’s been for us, that live learning.

It means that we’ve been able to understand what really irks people, what really works for people, and we’ve made a lot of changes based on that. Also, we’ve been able to find out how satisfied people are with our service through using it live, which is a great feeling.

At the technical level, we know that can make our service scalable now, which you couldn’t do theoretically if you hadn’t gone into public beta with it. We’ve learned a hell of a lot; it’s been a real journey.

Interviewer: One of the things that GDS is working on is support for service managers who are already managing a service, but equally as important, service managers who are about to begin managing a service in the weeks, and months, and years ahead.

Kit: Yes.

Interviewer: If you imagine, you’ve probably seen the those cartoons where it’s a cartoon head drawn from the side, and you can see inside the person’s brain, and you can see all the things that occupy their brain, their thoughts all the time. What’s inside a service manager’s head?

Kit: On any given day, what will generally be inside my head regarding LPA is – and these are in no priority order – I will have a user occupying most of my head, because we hate to lose sight of them. On any given day, I will be looking at our analytics, which we find really, really important, seeing what people are looking for in that tool and seeing whether people are happy, seeing things like completion rates. It’ll be focusing on what they’re doing.

I’ve got a big stakeholder bubble. We know that certain people are really excited about us going live; we know that we’ve got some challenges about going live. At the moment I’m thinking a lot about who we have to tell, whose expectations we have to manage, who’s really happy, who I need to make happy, so there’s a big stakeholder bubble.

There’s a little finance bubble in there as well, where I think, “How much am I spending? Am I giving value for money to our fee payers, actually?” OPG is fee-funded, so I’ve got a big finance bubble in my head.

Then the other biggest bubble is the team one, so I’ve definitely got a big focus on what I see as a key part of a service manager’s role, which is supporting a product owner, supporting a delivery manager, and supporting developers. I spend a lot of my time unblocking their problems actually, and that’s the bit that I think is a massive focus of my job.

Interviewer: If you had a chance to talk to some of those other service managers – perhaps you already have, I don’t know – what would be the two or three most important, most useful tips that you would have for them as they embark on managing a service?

Kit: Yes, I do actually; I’ve given a few talks as part of the service manager induction training, which I should probably say is absolutely amazing training. I’m not talking about my bit of it, but it’s incredibly comprehensive and very useful. I will leave aside the bit of advice that says, “Go on the service manager training,” but if I were going to talk to myself a year ago, which is when I started this role, I would say, “Don’t underestimate relationship management,” would be the single biggest one.

I think I probably underestimated at the beginning of this journey – and I took over just before we went into beta – that keeping people happy, keeping people comfortable, telling people what you’re doing, being open, being transparent, and having great relationships with people is actually the way to the best possible user experience, because the lines between users, developers, senior managers, stakeholders, if any one of those is cut, you are going to end up with really, really poor outcomes.

Relationship management is one of them; support, oddly enough, is another one which is really, really looming large in my mind at the moment. It is focusing on making your service sustainable, and the way to make your service sustainable in the terms that we use, in agile terms, is making sure that you can support this service after going live or after you go into beta, and how you enable continuous deployment.

I think there’s generally an acceptance that we want products to stay alive now, and that kind of language is getting very much into people’s heads, but actually the realisation of that and “What does a support model look like for a bit of software in Government that needs to be continuously iterated?” is actually a bigger problem than I think people are grasping at the moment, some people at least.

That is compounded where you’re working with legacy services, and legacy systems, and legacy teams. That’s one of the biggest things, is where you’ve got to make a service sustainable, really, really focusing on that from the outset.

Then probably the third one is the service manual, which is… I find myself saying this a lot, but actually I believe that the service manual is one of the best bits of guidance I’ve ever read in my job. I don’t just mean my job as a service manager; I mean my job, period, in the civil service. It’s incredibly well written, and it’s clear, and it’s concise, and every single person I bring into my team has to read it. If you keep that with you, you probably shouldn’t stray too far.

Interviewer: You’re very close to launching a live service, properly live, going from public beta; what are your thoughts on how different it’s going to be once it’s live? Is it going to be different or will it be pretty much the same as it’s been during public beta? How will it be different if it’s going to be different?

Kit: Yes, that’s a really good question actually. I think, from the user’s point of view, day minus one to day one of going live won’t be a great deal different actually. The user interface is going to be the same; we’re not deploying some massive new feature. We never deploy massive new features; we release regularly as small and frequent a releasing as possible. The user, I’m hoping, will have the same great experience with us that they’ve always had.

What it means for us as a product team is massive actually, underneath all that, for two reasons; firstly, there is the pride that a team gets from having launched a service live and having passed a service standards assessment, fingers crossed. Secondly, actually, it’s about robustness, because it happens to be with LPA. We’ve been pretty happy with the user experience, the front, for some time actually. We know that people are very happy with it, but we’ve been working a lot on scalability at the platform level.

We’ve committed that we won’t go live until we can realise that scalability, so for us the process of going live means that we can start to really push LPA Digital in a way that we haven’t been able to and we’ve been quite frustrated with so far. Because we’ve committed not to go live until we’re really confident about scalability, it means to us the start of a really, really nice journey of awareness-raising and being able to really, really get into the meat of channel shift, which means a lot to us.

Interviewer: Are you excited?

Kit: Very; very, very excited. Yes, as I say, there’s a pride element to it. There’s a bit of a nice nervousness in going first. We’ve always… It happens to be with timing and with a bit of a fair wind. OPG has been one of the first to do quite a few things and we’re one of the first to be doing this as well. Yes, we’re incredibly excited about going live.

Interviewer: Brilliant, thank you.

Kit: You’re welcome.

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This week at GDS we released our social media playbook and launched the new social media blog.

Over on Inside GOV.UK, they’re talking about changes to statistics on the GOV.UK homepage.

Ever wondered about the history of the Royal Messengers? Find out more on the History of government blog.

The DVLA digital team are getting excited about their move to a public beta.

Want to find out more about betas on GOV.UK? GDS design notes has the answers.

Today the Digital by Default Service Standard comes into full force. We first published the standard in April last year, along with the Service Design Manual, to give services time to ensure that they could meet the criteria.

We created the standard in response to Action 6 of the Government Digital Strategy. The standard has 26 different criteria that each new or redesigned service launched on GOV.UK must meet.

Each point of the criteria looks at different aspects of a digital service. These criteria are the building blocks for making a user-focused service that is safe and changes over time based on feedback.

The standard supports both the Cabinet Office spend controls and protects the integrity of GOV.UK itself.

Why it matters

The standard was developed over time, influenced by the way GDS was building GOV.UK. It’s important that services meet this standard so that users of GOV.UK can expect the same high quality and ease of use throughout the site, no matter which service they are accessing.

The standard is also important in leading change within government; making sure that all the skills and capabilities we need to make a successful service are part of the same team, and embedded within departments and agencies.

We’ve had positive feedback from service managers who found the assessments helpful in continuing to iterate their services:

We had an assessment last week, it really did feel collaborative with lots of knowledge sharing.

Of course, we’ll be continuing to iterate the process as well.

What has changed

In the last year we have run over 50 assessments, using the standard as the basis for deciding if a service is on track to be Digital by Default. These assessments have a focus on understanding user needs, security, privacy, and the capability to iterate a service quickly based on feedback.

We’ve shared what we’ve learnt, and have been working hard to make sure the standard is in the best shape to assess services against.

Although it has never affected the outcome of an assessment, some points of the standard seem to lack the clarity that we have come to expect. So, we are changing the wording of some points to be certain there is no doubt of their meaning. For example, point 13 originally stated:

“Build a service with the same look, feel and tone as GOV.UK, using the service manual.”

From today this will now be:

“Build a service consistent with the user experience of the rest of GOV.UK by using the design patterns and style guide.”

A small but important change that will help services and assessors alike.

One other change is to clarify the stages of assessments. All services should expect to be assessed at least three times during the normal development cycles of alpha, beta and live. We will make sure that assessments happen at some point after an alpha is completed, before a service is launched on GOV.UK as a beta, and finally before a service goes ‘live’ and is certified as Digital by Default.

Let’s have some clarity

GDS is committed to working in the open – making decisions and reporting the work that is happening, like on this blog. Assessments are no different; we have been publishing the outcomes since the beginning of the year on the GDS data blog. This was just the start. The information so far has not included specific results on each point of the standard, so we are going to include these details with assessments completed from today.

Departments themselves will be assessing services with less than 100,000 transactions and we will soon be publishing details before they launch on GOV.UK. We know that by sharing this information we are all accountable for the results of an assessment, and we expect service managers will use this to better understand the assessment process.

I want to thank everyone at GDS and across government who have helped to make Digital by Default integral to how we build services; it’s going to be a busy year getting some 150 services through assessments.

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The Transactions Explorer has enabled government to track progress on its key performance indicators for the first time.

Cost per transaction and digital take-up are two critical performance metrics in the government’s digital strategy.

The latest data on costs and digital take-up from government services show an exciting trend; the cost of transactions between the government and public service users is steadily falling, and the digital take-up is rising.

The other two metrics covered in the digital strategy (user satisfaction and completion rate) are also worth calling out; ultimately the most noticeable difference government will make to its digital services will be in the quality of the user experience.

Despite an environment of fiscal austerity, we want to make “digital services so good that people prefer to use them”. We have begun to systematically measure user satisfaction, and the proportion of people that manage to get from the start to the end of services. We hope to show a similarly positive trend emerging over the next 12 months.

Costs falling, digital rising

We began collecting information on costs over two years ago. Until now, we haven’t wanted to draw conclusions from just a small number of data points.

The Digital Efficiency Report in 2012 assessed that there are enormous cost differences between digital transactions and those involving the post or telephone calls. Now we have over 1,000 measurements, we think there is a clear trend emerging that backs up this assessment.

As the tables below show, over the course of a year and a half, costs have steadily fallen 7% in nominal terms, and 10% in real terms.

Over five quarters, digital take-up has also risen steadily by 9%. With 1.5 billion transactions between government, businesses and citizens each year, small falls in costs equate to hundreds of millions of pounds in savings for users and the taxpayer.

We took the figures above from a sample of the total 771 services central government provides. 138 services supplied information on their cost per transaction; 371 services supplied data on their digital take-up.

Still, we believe these numbers are robust. We prioritise collection on the largest services, and the top 138 services cover 94% of the total volume of transactions between government, citizens and businesses.

The raw data is published here. We have weighted both indexes to reflect the relative size of different services, and we used linear interpolation to ensure that any gaps in the data didn’t skew the averages. The Transactions Explorer has more detail on how we calculated the numbers here.

Variation on a theme

Across the hundreds of services covered by the data, the picture is, of course, uneven. Some of the fastest risers include the DVLA’s Statutory Off Road Notification (68% to 94%); DWP’s Carers Allowance (0% to 25%); and Home Office Visa and Immigration applications (62% to 81%). Even digital applications for fishing rod licences rose from 16% to 37%.

Many services (and especially the smaller services) still have little or no digital take-up, and have not changed over this period. There are still a lot of services with a surprisingly high cost per transaction.

Here to help

GDS doesn’t just help to collect and publish these figures, but exists to work with other parts of government to improve them.

We are closely involved with 25 of the largest services through the Transformation programme, but beyond those 25 we continue to work with departments to build digital capability and support service improvement.

We continue to update the Digital Service Manual, run service assessments, and provide training for service managers. The GDS recruitment hub has helped departments to fill a number of senior digital roles. We also continue to operate Cabinet Office spending controls over digital and IT expenditure.

Service level analytics are also an important part of our ability not just to appraise service performance, but to help those responsible for those services to make improvements.

The Performance Platform has more detailed dashboards available for about a dozen services. I’ll be talking more in a future post about the way service managers will soon be able to connect their own services to the platform, to help them understand how we’re doing.

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